Present-day habits of nutrition are characterized by an increasing consumption of purified natural products with a high calorie content, which are mostly easily digestible but contain hardly any roughage. Especially starch products and sugar, frequently combined in sweet baked articles, besides providing too copious a supply of fat, contribute to the fact that a large proportion of the population is subject not only to overweight and at the same time a disturbed digestion, but often also to genuine metabolic diseases with their subsequent phenomena. In innumerable cases the lack of roughage means that the passage of the ingested food through the intestine is controllable only by means of mostly chemical purgatives, whereby in almost all cases after a generally short period of habituation it is necessary to take ever stronger agents which frequently disable rather than stimulate the natural movements of the intestine and remove from the body not only considerable quantities of liquid, but also vital trace elements, vitamins and salts. The intestinal sluggishness caused by a lack of roughage in the food leads frequently to an excessively long residence time of this food in the intestine, so that also undesirable decomposition products can be absorbed by the body, which then lead, in turn, to the onset of diseases.
Attempts have been made for a long time to counteract the lack of roughage in modern nutrition by providing additional natural roughage in the form of wheat bran and other fibrous parts of cereals which, on the one hand, inhibit the feeling of hunger and, on the other hand, attempt, by being added to the normal diet, to compensate the lack of roughage in said diet. Unfortunately, the impairment of the customary flavor of the food after the addition of such roughage, or the separate ingestion thereof before a meal leads to the fact that, even after a short time, the simultaneous or separate ingestion of the roughage is abandoned despite favorable accompanying phenomena in respect of stool regulation and that, in its stead, purgatives are adopted again, not only to counter the excess of supplied calories, but above all to prevent constipation already chronic today. There has therefore been a genuine long-felt need to make available a composition for natural digestion regulation which, on the one hand, does not have the known disadvantages of conventional, particularly chemical purgatives, such as deprivation of liquids, vitamins, salts and minerals, and, on the other hand, can be supplied to the body separately from the absorption of food, that is, without impairing the flavor and consistency of this food, and which regulates digestion again so naturally that even chronic constipation is eliminated without purgatives and especially without their generally eight-hour rhythm felt to be unpleasant by most patients.